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Classical Pick: The Modern

“In the ranks of major composers, Alban Berg is a strange, almost freakish case,” writes Alex Ross this week (subscribers can read the column online). “In his youth, the Austrian composer merely dabbled in music, his songs and piano sketches showing facility but no extraordinary talent. Then, after becoming Arnold Schoenberg’s pupil, at the age of nineteen, he developed with startling swiftness. Although Berg followed Schoenberg in abandoning conventional tonal harmony and, later, in adopting twelve-tone compositions, his works reverberate with echoes of Wagner, Strauss, and, especially, Mahler, whom Berg worshipped to the point of stealing a baton form the maestro’s dressing room. If Schoenberg always seemed to be marching in a straight line, Berg moved in majestic loops, lunging forward and then swinging back.” Listen to a podcast of the composer’s “Sonata for Piano, Opus 1,” performed at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Photograph: SZ Photo/Bridgeman

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